Kambui Olujimi’s project North Star creates a space for explorations of Self and Blackness that are as expansive and boundless as the cosmos. The artist, who was born and raised in the storied Black neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, has long been captivated by the idea of nuclear fission and the immense energy contained in a single atom, embracing the idea as evidence of both humanity’s limitless potential and our origins in stardust and the cosmos.
In a series of ink, watercolour and graphite works on paper, and a painted astral mural, North Star posits gravity as a metaphor for white supremacy, asking: What are the possibilities of the Self when it is unbound by gravity and freed to play? When it is allowed to exist not in a state of resistance, but release? In 2022, the artist chartered a zero-gravity flight for seven creatives from the African diaspora, who experienced weightlessness not as metaphorical but material. The figures in ten large-scale paintings are in part modelled after those seven untethered bodies. The result is a radical and tender invitation to embrace the possibility of unboundedness in our everyday, terrestrial lives.
—Lauren Schell Dickens
